Why?why?why? did you just give him this defense? I remember going to art galleries, showing people i knew or had met, who had told me in abstract about their art, or how much time went in to it, or some sort of justifying line of you should come see, and when i did get there, i, in all good faith, believed what they said was true, just not obvious. Most of the time, i swore they had a secret written manifesto, where instead of actually intending what they were presenting, it was a andy kaufmenesque, see, i pulled one over on you fools sort of thing, and more and more, it feels like this, it's not an artist's journey, its a hack, a scam. And not from conjecture, i've heard it right and true. and while i would admire the humbling stance before such a large collection of audience members where one feels insufficient, this is different. But i should also mention what i call inadvertent art, where the artist think they are saying or doing one thing, but seen in context, it is a whole other message. So, since it's too late now, it's out there. you've (or we) have just given em something else to steal and hide behind. lets just use the all to popular copout, it's just art...

He was already going for a defense. LaBeouf is a fraud who's trying to figure out a way to "art" himself out of the pile of shit he put himself in. Kenneth Goldsmith (one of LaBeouf's "inspirations") says as much, too.

Franco is being far more generous that he need be. I respect Franco's interest and examination of celebrity and art hierarchies. And so far, he's managed to do it without stealing from indie artists.

LaBeouf didn't just create work with a similar plot to Clowes' book, as Franco says. My understanding is that he lifted large chunks of text and dialogue verbatim. Then he got caught, and got caught plagiarizing his apology as well, and that's when he started formulating this plan to pretend it's all some kind of performance art. It's all a song and dance to try to get off the hook for a particularly egregious and brazen case of plagiarism.

I respect Franco as an intelligent man and a talented actor, but his opinion here seems uninformed, as if he's jumping in to defend a fellow young actor without considering all the details. This isn't the same as a giving the system a middle finger by working on a soap opera. This is trying to pass someone else's work off as your own, and then throwing a big old hissyfit when your hand gets slapped.